


They're sorry now

by Apuzzlingprince



Series: IT Fanfics [15]
Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Bullying, Character Death, Child Neglect, Gen, Morally Ambiguous Bill Denbrough, Off-screen Deaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-07-23 20:35:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16166540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Apuzzlingprince/pseuds/Apuzzlingprince
Summary: The residents of Derry regarded him as weird and scary, and his friends distanced themselves from the mental case claiming they were all in danger, they were going to die. They enjoyed their summer. Bill spent it in cold, dirty alleyways and filthy sewer pipes and on stages, yelling his throat raw to an impassive audience. The kids of Derry jeered and bullied him, while the adults turned a blind eye.Bill tries to warn Derry.





	They're sorry now

**Author's Note:**

> Since it's Halloween month, I thought I'd write something appropriately dark. Enjoy!

Many people preferred ignorance over knowledge, particularly when that ignorance gave them the illusion of safety. This was something Bill had observed frequently in the backwater town of Derry, and it was evident in the dog-eared posters of missing children fluttering on every power pole, in the miniature coffins populating the graveyard, and in every indifferent news report. Ignorance was a key feature of Derry and no one could live there long without succumbing to its influence.

Georgie Denbrough suffered the same fate as all children who lived here. He was forgotten. Within a month, the search for Georgie had ended. Within two, the Denbrough’s were the only people that seemed to remember Georgie Denbrough had existed at all. His parents surrendered to their grief while Bill stagnated in the first stage of loss: denial. He refused to relinquish his brother to death. He would not,  _could_  not let Georgie become yesterday’s news.

His attempts to enlighten Derry started with his parents. It hurt them to acknowledge Georgie’s absence and Bill had no desire to compound on that hurt, but they needed to know Georgie was still out there if they were to be a family again. He fought to make them understand. He argued with them. Pleaded with them. Begged on his hands and knees. He tried everything to make them understand, even built a miniature model of Derry’s sewer system, but they plugged their ears against his desperate cries and it didn’t take Bill long to realise how futile his efforts were.

Adults, he concluded, would not help him. Deep down, he had always known this. It was still painful to acknowledge that his parents were just as useless as all the other adults in Derry, even while their son was begging and pleading with them just to listen,  _please, just listen to me_ -!

It hurt, but it wouldn't stop him.

He went to his friends next. They were young enough to still have hope, but old enough to understand the gravity of the situation. He told them that Georgie was still out there, cold and scared and lost in the sewer, and Bill needed to find him. He persisted even when Richie diverted his eyes, and he ignored the uneasy way Eddie shifted from foot, as though Bill were telling him a scary tale. He looked to Stan for support and Stan’s expression mirrored Richie’s, his gaze diverted and lips one thin, pale line, and he didn’t need to open his mouth for Bill to know what he wanted to say:  _don’t you think we should leave this to the adults? We’re just kids. We don’t know anything about this stuff._

Bill needed more evidence.

He went alone to the barrens. He dug Betty Ripsom’s shoe out of the filth and didn’t bother cleaning the sewage out from under his nails before bringing it to his friends. When they regarded him with surprise, he thought finally,  _finally_ , a foothold, and he took it as an opportunity to announce that this wasn’t just about Georgie anymore. The other kids of Derry were out there somewhere too, and they could find them.

He compiled missing posters of all the kids that had gone missing since Georgie. Georgie Denbrough, Betty Ripsom, Eddie Corcoran, and later Patrick Hockstetter and Gard Jagermeyer. He showed them how the posters had been layered on power poles and then counted each lingering staple. There were over twenty embedded in the wood.

They looked doubtfully upon this collection of evidence, so he went to the local library next, gathering obituary entries for children over the past century. There were so many that his arms were overflowing as he presented the scans to his friends. Look, he shouted. Not with words, but with his wide eyes and shaking hands and paper fluttering to the floor of their clubhouse. Look! You can’t deny this! There’s something happening here! We can’t keep on pretending everything is alright!

But they did. They turned their pale, drawn faces away.

“It’s summer,” said Richie, and it took everything Bill had not to clock him in the jaw.

His friends wouldn’t listen, so he implored the other residents of Derry. He put up printouts detailing all the relevant information. He handed out missing posters. He wrote think pieces and submitted them to the local newspaper.

The printouts and missing posters found their way into bins and gutters, becoming useless clumps of soggy paper that bore no signs of having been read. The think pieces were never published save for an editorial note laughing at the ‘mystic bullshit’ they had been sent. There was not even one person willing to be audience to his cries for recognition.

Bill didn’t give up. He was done taking the traditional routes of conveying information. If the town refused to listen when he approached them as a friend, then he would approach them as a goddamn  _harbinger_.

He forced people to listen. He crawled onto stage during a clown’s performance and shouted his message at the top of his lungs. He scrawled warnings on sandwich boards and picketed funerals. He wrote it on walls in permanent marker and moved up to spray cans after stealing twenty dollars from his mother’s purse.

The residents of Derry regarded him as weird and scary, and his friends distanced themselves from the mental case claiming  _they were all in danger, they were going to die_. They enjoyed their summer. Bill spent it in cold, dirty alleyways and filthy sewer pipes and on stages, yelling his throat raw to an impassive audience. The kids of Derry jeered and bullied him, while the adults turned a blind eye. 

He was thrown into a jail cell by the police one evening as a means of ‘scaring him straight’. His parents refused pick him up; they didn’t want to be associated with him any more than the rest of Derry. The officers released him after two hours. Bill went right back to screaming for the town’s attention.

No one listened. No one human, anyway.

* * *

The local news would later claim that it was foundation vulnerabilities and the dilapidated sewer system it was built over that had caused Derry High to collapse. Bill knew better. He had been there to see exactly why and how it happened and had been completely powerless to do anything about it; but that was alright. He had prepared for this day.

He had seen many a movie where a building had collapsed. None of them had conveyed just how loud a collapsing building was. It was like a roar. One long, booming roar interspersed with brief instances of screaming and crunching metal and breaking glass. The sound shuddered its way through Bill’s body, a shock-wave that made his ears pop and his head spin. He probably would have been rendered deaf had he not been in the bubble of safety provided by It.

It clapped a hand over his thin shoulder, its long fingers spreading dirt and blood on his t-shirt. He didn’t turn to face it. He watched as his peers were swallowed up by the debris, pummelled into the earth by falling rock and pushed down into Its domain. The fear on their faces promised a tasty meal.

“What do you think, Billy?” It asked. Its name was Pennywise, but Bill only ever referred to the  _thing_  as It. “Quite the show, isn’t it? I don’t know why I waited so long to do this again! It gets funnier every time!”

Bill blinked dust out of his eyes. “We had a deal,” was all he said.

It made a faint sound of displeasure. “And I fulfilled it. They’re alive.”

“Then w-where are they?” he asked.

“You don’t trust me? I’m hurt, Billy. And when  _I_  was the only one who believed in you.” It clucked Its long, slimy tongue and released Bill’s shoulder, turning away. It had gotten no less uncomfortable to be around over the several months Bill had known It. “Fine, fine! This part should be  _fun_ , anyway.”

It stepped into the debris and approached the sole standing section of the high school, pulling open the door. His four friends came stumbling out with dusty, tear-streaked faces and bloody knees, coughing haggardly as they clawed their way toward liberation. They each emitted strangled screams upon seeing It.

Bill raised a hand to attract their attention. It didn’t work. The clown had to grab Eddie by the arm and drag him over to Bill for them to snap out of their hysteria. It dropped Eddie in a heap at Bill’s feet and finally his friends noticed him, turning away from the clown to gaze at Bill.

Through he was obviously scared and confused, Richie came slamming into him with a hug. He almost threw Bill off his feet. Bill wrapped his arms around Richie and hugged loosely back, then turned to receive a hug from both Stan and Eddie.

“Bill,” Stan was babbling. “Bill, there’s still kids in there! We- we need to get them out, help them-!”

“We can’t,” said Bill, stroking between Stan’s shoulder blades, trying to comfort him. “They’re d-dead.”

“Please, B-bill, we- we have to do something,“ Stan was choking on his tears. “And w-why are we alive? Why- why is- I don’t understand the c-clown, Bill!”

Bill gently dislodged him, glancing over at Eddie and Richie, who were looking uneasily up at It. It wouldn’t hurt them. They had made a deal. For all intents and purposes, it was currently a harmless, if queer looking clown. No teeth or claws. None of the things it had initially approached Bill with. It didn’t want to scare Bill’s friends because it didn’t  _need_  to. It had more than enough food to last it the next twenty-seven years.

It had been twenty minutes since the beginning of the collapse. Dust was still rising up in great, choking clouds from the school. Soon the ambulances and fire fighters would start to arrive, but they wouldn’t find any live bodies to drag out of the rubble. They wouldn’t find any bodies at all.

“Bill,” said Richie weakly. “What- what’s going on? Why is there a clown here? Was there- was there a fucking play at school on today or what?”

Eddie sobbed quietly, saying nothing. He would have been incoherent in his terror, anyway.

“It’s okay,” said Bill, calm despite the surrounding chaos. “I s-saved you guys. I made a deal with the clown. It's the creature I told you guys about. The one that's been taking all the children.” He pointed at It, who slowly drifted away from his friends to take Its place behind him. “It's real, just like I s-said, but everything’s g-going to be o-okay now.”

“Okay?” Richie choked out. “Okay? People are dying, Bill – people are  _dead_!”

“And why the hell are you making deals with - with whatever the hell _that_ is?” asked Stan, his voice shrill.

Bill threw up his hands in a placating gesture. “It doesn’t matter why. Just- just that we’re safe. I s-saved us. It was going to kill u-us all, but I s-saved us.”

“I don’t,” Stan said, stuttering on his words. “I don’t understand. This doesn't make any sense!”

“All you need t-to know is the c-clown was going to kill e-everyone in the school,” said Bill, reaching over to give Stan's shoulder a comforting squeeze. There was no point in going into detail. They wouldn't understand. They hadn't heard the things Bill had, hadn't seen the truth of this world and of existence itself. It had shown him _everything_. “And I s-s-stopped him," he said, offering a wavering smile. "I s-saved us, Stan."

Or rather, he gave them time. Everyone returned to the weeds eventually, the clown had explained. He had just pushed their expiration date back a little.

“What about  _them_?” asked Richie, his voice on the verge of screaming. “Why couldn’t the clown save them too?”

“Because-“

“Because why, Bill?” Stan wiped snot from beneath his nose. “If- if you could help us, why not them too?”

“Because,” said Bill. “Because they w-wouldn’t _listen_ , okay? They w-wouldn’t listen to me. I tried to tell them. I sh-s-shouted it every duh-d-day during summer, and no one, not e-even you guys, would listen to me!” He looked imploringly at his friends, his bottom lip trembling. “There was n-nothing I could d-do for them. I could o-only do this. I c-could only save us.”

“Nothing you could do?” spoke up Eddie. He'd finally recovered his voice. “You could have called the f-fucking police, Bill,” Eddie said, his voice choked and quiet, but possessing strength nonetheless. “You could have called in a bomb threat or s-something! You just- you don’t just…” He wiped a palm down his face. “You don’t just leave them to die!”

Bill withdrew in shock and hurt. He looked at each of their faces and he found assent in each of them. “That's n-n-not what I did. You g-guys just don’t understand.”

“Understand?” Stan was screaming his words now. “That you made a deal with - with that _thing_ so we would live and everyone else would die!?”

“It wasn’t l-like that,” Bill said back, his anger overwhelming his hurt. His voice grew steadily to a shout. “It’s n-not my fault! If they had just listened to me, n-none of this would have happened! Everyone would still be alive! But they didn’t.” He stalked closer, and his friends backed up, huddling together, their busted knees and grimy faces shining under the flames rising up from somewhere in the school. “T-they spat on my warnings. They th-t-threw them back in my face. They made me feel like I was cuh-c-crazy, like there was some-t-th-thing wrong with me. And so did you guys, but I s-saved you anyway because you’re my  _friends_. They  _weren’t_.”

He felt Its hand back on his shoulder.

“And you know what?” he said. His friends withdrew even further and he felt some twisted, bitter part of himself wrench itself free as he recognised the fear on their faces.

“You know what?” he repeated, his voice quiet again, calm. “They’re sorry now.”


End file.
